|
Wotan
Carl Gustav
Jung
|
“In Germany shall
divers sects arise,
Coming very near to
happy paganism.
The heart captivated
and small receivings
Shall open the gate to
pay the true tithe.”
- Prophecies of
Nostradamus, 1555
|
When we look back to the time
before 1914, we find ourselves living in a world of events which would have
been inconceivable before the war. We were even beginning to regard war
between civilized nations as a fable, thinking that such an absurdity would
become less and less possible in our rational, internationally organized
world. And what came after the war was a veritable witches’ Sabbath.
Everywhere fantastic revolutions, violent alterations of the map,
reversions in politics to medieval or even antique prototypes, totalitarian
states that engulf their neighbours and outdo all previous theocracies in
their absolutist claims, persecutions of Christians and Jews, wholesale
political murder, and finally we have witnessed a light-hearted piratical
raid on a peaceful, half-civilized people.
With such goings on in the wide world it is not in the least surprising
that there should be equally curious manifestations on a smaller scale in
other spheres. In the realm of philosophy we shall have to wait some time
before anyone is able to assess the kind of age that we are living in. But
in the sphere of religion we can see at once that some very significant
things have been happening. We need feel no surprise that in Russia the
colourful splendours of the Eastern Orthodox Church have been superseded by
the Movement of the Godless – indeed, one breathed a sigh of relief oneself
when one emerged from the haze of an Orthodox church with its multitude of
lamps and entered an honest mosque, where the sublime and invisible
omnipresence of God was not crowded out by a superfluity of sacred
paraphernalia. Tasteless and pitiably unintelligent as it is, and however
deplorable the low spiritual level of the “Scientific” reaction, it was
inevitable that nineteenth-century “scientific” enlightenment should one
day dawn in Russia.
But what is more than curious – indeed, piquant to a degree – is that an
ancient God of storm and frenzy, the long quiescent Wotan, should awake,
like an extinct volcano, to new activity, in a civilized country that had
long been supposed to have outgrown the Middle Ages. We have seen him come
to life in the German Youth Movement, and right at the beginning the blood
of several sheep was shed in honour of his resurrection. Armed with
rucksack and lute, blond youths, and sometimes girls as well, were to be
seen as restless wanderers on every road from North Cape to Sicily,
faithful votaries of the roving god. Later, towards the end of the Weimar
Republic, the wandering role was taken over by thousands of unemployed, who
were to be met with everywhere on their aimless journeys. By 1933 they
wandered no longer, but marched in their hundreds of thousands. The Hitler
movement literally brought the whole of Germany to its feet, from
five-year-olds to veterans, and produced a spectacle of a nation migrating
from one place to another. Wotan the wanderer was on the move. He could be
seen, looking rather shamefaced, in the meeting-house of a sect of simple
folk in North Germany, disguised as Christ sitting on a white horse. I do
not know if these people were aware of Wotan’s ancient connection with the
figures of Christ and Dionysus, but it is not very probable.
Wotan is a restless wanderer who creates unrest and stirs up strife, now
here, now there, and works magic. He was soon changed by Christianity into
the devil, and only lived on in fading local traditions as a ghostly hunter
who was seen with his retinue, flickering like a will o’ the wisp through
the stormy night. In the Middle Ages the role of the restless wanderer was
taken over by Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, which is not a Jewish but a
Christian legend. The motif of the wanderer who has not accepted Christ was
projected on the Jews, in the same way as we always rediscover our
unconscious psychic contents in other people. At any rate the coincidence
of anti-Semitism with the reawakening of Wotan is a psychological subtlety
that may perhaps be worth mentioning.
The German youths who celebrated the solstice with sheep-sacrifices were
not the first to hear the rustling in the primeval forest of
unconsciousness. They were anticipated by Nietzsche, Schuler, Stefan
George, and Ludwig Klages. The literary tradition of the Rhineland and the
country south of the Main has a classical stamp that cannot easily be got
rid of; every interpretation of intoxication and exuberance is apt to be
taken back to classical models, to Dionysus, to the peur aeternus and the
cosmogonic Eros. No doubt it sounds better to academic ears to interpret
these things as Dionysus, but Wotan might be a more correct interpretation.
He is the god of the storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions and the
lust of battle; moreover he is superlative magician and artist in illusion
who is versed in all secrets of an occult nature.
Nietzsche’s case is certainly a peculiar one. He had no knowledge of
Germanic literature; he discovered the “cultural Philistine”; and the
announcement that “God is dead” led to Zarathustra’s meeting with an
unknown god in unexpected form, who approached him sometimes as an enemy
and sometimes disguised as Zarathustra himself. Zarathustra, too, was a
soothsayer, a magician, and the storm-wind.
And like a wind shall I come to blow among them, and with my spirit
shall take away the breath of their spirit; thus my future wills it.
Truly, a strong wind is Zarathustra to all that are low; and this
counsel gives he to his enemies and to all that spit and spew: “Beware of
spitting against the wind.”
And when Zarathustra dreamed
that he was guardian of the graves in the “lone mountain forest of death,”
and was making a mighty effort to open the gates, suddenly
A roaring wind tore the gates asunder; whistling, shrieking, and
keening, it cast a black coffin before me.
And amid the roaring and whistling and shrieking the coffin burst open
and spouted a thousand peals of laughter.
The disciple who interpreted
the dream said to Zarathustra:
Are you not yourself the wind with shrill whistling, which bursts open
the gates of the fortress of death?
Are you not yourself the coffin filled with life’s gay malice and
angel-grimaces?
In 1863 or 1864, in his poem
To the Unknown God, Nietzsche had written:
I shall and will know thee, Unknown One,
Who searchest out the depths of my soul,
And blowest through my life like a storm,
Ungraspable, and yet my kinsman!
I shall and will know
thee, and serve thee.
Twenty years later, in his
Mistral Song, he wrote:
Mistral wind, chaser of clouds,
Killer of gloom, sweeper of the skies,
Raging storm-wind, how I love thee!
Are we not both the first-fruits
Of the same womb, forever predestined
To the same fate?
In the dithyramb known as
Ariadne’s Lament, Nietzsche is completely the victim of the hunter-god:
Stretched out, shuddering,
Like a half-dead thing whose feet are warmed,
Shaken by unknown fevers,
Shivering with piercing icy frost arrows
Hunted by thee, O thought,
Unutterable! Veiled! Horrible one!
Thou huntsman behind the cloud.
Struck down by thy lightening bolt,
Thou mocking eye that stares at me from the dark!
Thus I lie.
Writhing, twisted, tormented
With all eternal tortures.
Smitten
By thee, cruel huntsman,
Thou unknown – God!
This remarkable image of the
hunter-god is not a mere dithyrambic figure of speech but is based on an
experience which Nietzsche had when he was fifteen years old, at Pforta. It
is described in a book by Nietzsche’s sister, Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche.
As he was wandering in a gloomy wood at night, he was terrified by a
“blood-curdling shriek from a neighbouring lunatic asylum,” and soon
afterwards he came face to face with a huntsman whose “features were wild
and uncanny.” Setting his whistle to his lips “in a valley surrounded by
wild scrub,” the huntsman “blew such as a shrill blast” that Nietzsche lost
consciousness – but woke up again in Pforta. It was a nightmare. It is
significant that in his dream Nietzsche, who in reality intended to go to
Eisleben, Luther’s town, discussed with the huntsman the question of going
instead to “Teutschenthal” (Valley of the Germans). No one with ears can
misunderstand the shrill whistling of the storm-god in the nocturnal wood.
Was it really only the
classical philologist in Nietzsche that led to the god being called
Dionysus instead of Wotan – or was it perhaps due to his fateful meeting
with Wagner?
In his Reich ohne Raum, which was first published in 1919, Bruno Goetz saw
the secret of coming events in Germany in the form of a very strange
vision. I have never forgotten this little book, for it struck me at the
time as a forecast of the German weather. It anticipates the conflict
between the realm of ideas and life, between Wotan’s dual nature as a god
of storm and a god of secret musings. Wotan disappeared when his oaks fell
and appeared again when the Christian God proved too weak to save
Christendom from fratricidal slaughter. When the Holy Father at Rome could
only impotently lament before God the fate of the grex segregatus, the
one-eyed old hunter, on the edge of the German forest, laughed and saddled
Sleipnir.
We are always convinced that the modern world is a reasonable world, basing
our opinion on economic, political, and psychological factors. But if we
may forget for a moment that we are living in the year of Our Lord 1936,
and, laying aside our well-meaning, all-too human reasonableness, may
burden God or the gods with the responsibility for contemporary events
instead of man, we would find Wotan quite suitable as a casual hypothesis.
In fact, I venture the heretical suggestion that the unfathomable depths of
Wotan’s character explain more of National Socialism than all three
reasonable factors put together. There is no doubt that each of these
factors explains an important aspect of what is going on in Germany, but
Wotan explains yet more. He is particularly enlightening in regard to a
general phenomenon, which is so strange to anybody not a German that it
remains incomprehensible, even after the deepest reflection.
Perhaps we may sum up this general phenomenon as Ergriffenheit – a state of
being seized or possessed. The term postulates not only an Ergriffener (one
who is seized) but, also, an Ergreifer (one who seizes). Wotan is an Ergreifer
of men, and, unless one wishes to deify Hitler – which has indeed actually
happened – he is really the only explanation. It is true that Wotan shares
this quality with his cousin Dionysus, but Dionysus seems to have exercised
his influence mainly on women. The maenads were a species of female
storm-troopers, and, according to mythical reports, were dangerous enough.
Wotan confined himself to the berserkers, who found their vocation as the
Blackshirts of mythical kings.
A mind that is still childish thinks of the gods as metaphysical entities
existing in their own right, or else regards them as playful or
superstitious inventions. From either point of view the parallel between
Wotan redivivus and the social, political, and psychic storm that is shaking
Germany might have at least the value of parable. But since the gods are
without doubt personifications of psychic forces, to assert their
metaphysical existence is as much an intellectual presumption as the
opinion that they could ever be invented. Not that “psychic forces” have
anything to do with the conscious mind, fond as we are of playing with the
idea that consciousness and psyche are identical. This is only another
piece of intellectual presumption. “Psychic forces” have far more to do
with the realm of the unconscious. Our mania for rational explanations
obviously has its roots in our fear of metaphysics, for the two were always
hostile brothers. Hence, anything unexpected that approaches us from the
dark realm is regarded either as coming from outside and, therefore, as
real, or else as a hallucination and, therefore, not true. The idea that
anything could be real or true which does not come from outside has hardly
begun to dawn on contemporary man.
For the sake of better understanding and to avoid prejudice, we could of
course dispense with the name “Wotan” and speak instead of the furor
Teutonicus. But we should only be saying the same thing and not as well,
for the furor in this case is a mere psychologizing of Wotan and tells us
no more than that the Germans are in a state of “fury.” We thus lose sight
of the most peculiar feature of this whole phenomenon, namely, the dramatic
aspect of the Ergreifer and the Ergriffener. The impressive thing about the
German phenomenon is that one man, who is obviously “possessed,” has
infected a whole nation to such an extent that everything is set in motion
and has started rolling on its course towards perdition.
It seems to me that Wotan hits the mark as an hypothesis. Apparently he
really was only asleep in the Kyffhauser mountain until the ravens called
him and announced the break of day. He is a fundamental attribute of the
German psyche, an irrational psychic factor which acts on the high pressure
of civilization like a cyclone and blows it away. Despite their crankiness,
the Wotan-worshippers seem to have judged things more correctly than the
worshippers of reason. Apparently everyone had forgotten that Wotan is a
Germanic datum of first importance, the trust expression and unsurpassed
personification of a fundamental quality that is particularly
characteristic of the Germans. Houston Stewart Chamberlain is a symptom
which arouses suspicion that other veiled gods may be sleeping elsewhere.
The emphasis on the German race – commonly called “Aryan” – the Germanic
heritage, blood and soil, the Wagalaweia songs, the ride of the Valkyries,
Jesus as a blond and blue-eyed hero, the Greek mother of St. Paul, the
devil as an international Alberich in Jewish or Masonic guise, the Nordic
aurora borealis as the light of civilization, the inferior Mediterranean
races – all this is the indispensable scenery for the drama that is taking
place and at the bottom they all mean the same thing: a god has taken
possession of the Germans and their house is filled with a “mighty rushing
wind.” It was soon after Hitler seized power, if I am not mistaken, that a
cartoon appeared in Punch of a raving berserker tearing himself free from
his bonds. A hurricane has broken loose in Germany while we still believe
it is fine weather.
Things are comparatively quite in Switzerland, though occasionally there is
a puff of wind from the north or south. Sometimes it has a slightly ominous
sound, sometimes it whispers so harmlessly or even idealistically that no
one is alarmed. “Let the sleeping dogs lie” – we manage to get along pretty
well with this proverbial wisdom. It is sometimes said that the Swiss are
singularly averse to making a problem of themselves. I must rebut this
accusation: the Swiss do have their problems, but they would not admit it
for anything in the world, even though they see which way the wind is
blowing. We thus pay our tribute to the time of storm and stress in
Germany, but we never mention it, and this enables us to feel vastly
superior.
It is above all the Germans who have an opportunity, perhaps unique in
history, to look into their own hearts and to learn what those perils of
the soul were from which Christianity tried to rescue mankind. Germany is a
land of spiritual catastrophes, where nature never makes more than a pretense
of peace with the world-ruling reason. The disturber of the peace is a wind
that blows into Europe from Asia’s vastness, sweeping in on a wide front
from Thrace to the Baltic, scattering the nations before it like dry
leaves, or inspiring thoughts that shake the world to its foundations. It
is an elemental Dionysus breaking into the Apollonian order. The rouser of
this Tempest is named Wotan, and we can learn a good deal about him from
the political confusion and spiritual upheaval he has caused throughout
history. For a more exact investigation of his character, however, we must
go back to the age of myths, which did not explain everything in terms of
man and his limited capabilities, but sought the deeper cause in the psyche
and its autonomous powers. Man’s earliest intuitions personified these
powers as gods, and described them in the myths with great care and
circumstantiality according to their various characters. This could be done
the more readily on account of the firmly established primordial types or
images which are innate in the unconscious of many races and exercise a
direct influence upon them. Because the behavior of a race takes on its
specific character from its underlying images, we can speak of an archetype
“Wotan.” As an autonomous psychic factor, Wotan produces effects in the
collective life of a people and thereby reveals his own nature. For Wotan
has a peculiar biology of his own, quite apart from the nature of man. It
is only from time to time that individuals fall under the irresistible
influence of this unconscious factor. When it is quiescent, one is no more
aware of the archetype Wotan than of a latent epilepsy. Could the Germans
who were adults in 1914 have foreseen what they would be today? Such
amazing transformations are the effect of the god of wind, that “bloweth
where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell
whence it cometh, nor whither it goeth.” It seizes everything in its path
and overthrows everything that is not firmly rooted. When the wind blows it
shakes everything that is insecure, whether without or within.
Martin Ninck has recently published a monograph which is a most welcome
addition to our knowledge of Wotan’s nature. The reader need not fear that
this book is nothing but a scientific study written with academic aloofness
from the subject. Certainly the right to scientific objectivity is fully
preserved, and the material has been collected with extraordinary
thoroughness and presented in unusually clear form. But, over and above all
this, one feels that the author is vitally interested in it, that the chord
of Wotan is vibrating in him, too. This is no criticism – on the contrary,
it is one of the chief merits of the book, which without this enthusiasm
might easily have degenerated into a tedious catalogue. Ninck sketches a
really magnificent portrait of the German archetype Wotan. He describes him
in ten chapters, using all the available sources, as the berserker, the god
of storm, the wanderer, the warrior, the Wunsch- and Minne-god, the lord of
the dead and of the Einherjar, the master of secret knowledge, the
magician, and the god of the poets. Neither the Valkyries nor the Fylgja
are forgotten, for they form part of the mythological background and
fateful significance of Wotan. Ninck’s inquiry into the name and its origin
is particularly instructive. He shows that Wotan is not only a god of rage
and frenzy who embodies the instinctual and emotional aspect of the
unconscious. Its intuitive and inspiring side, also, manifests itself in
him, for he understands the runes and can interpret fate.
The Romans identified Wotan with Mercury, but his character does not really
corresponded to any Roman or Greek god, although there are certain
resemblances. He is a wanderer like Mercury, for instance, he rules over
the dead like Pluto and Kronos, and is connected with Dionysus by his
emotional frenzy, particularly in its mantic aspect. It is surprising that
Ninck does not mention Hermes, the god of revelation, who as pneuma and
nous is associated with the wind. He would be the connecting-link with the
Christian pneuma and the miracle of Pentecost. As Poimandres (the shepherd
of men), Hermes is an Ergreifer like Wotan. Ninck rightly points out that
Dionysus and the other Greek gods always remained under the supreme
authority of Zeus, which indicates a fundamental difference between the
Greek and Germanic temperament. Ninck assumes an inner affinity between
Wotan and Kronos, and the latter’s defeat may perhaps be a sign that the
Wotan-archetype was once overcome and split up in prehistoric times. At all
events, the Germanic god represents a totality on a very primitive level, a
psychological condition in which man’s will was almost identical with the
god’s and entirely at his mercy. But the Greeks had gods who helped man
against other gods; indeed, All-Father Zeus himself is not far from the
ideal of a benevolent, enlightened despot.
It was not in Wotan’s nature to linger on and show signs of old age. He
simply disappeared when the times turned against him, and remained
invisible for more than a thousand years, working anonymously and
indirectly. Archetypes are like riverbeds which dry up when the water
deserts them, but which it can find again at anytime. An archetype is like
an old watercourse along which the water of life has flowed for centuries,
digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it has flowed in this channel
the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return to its old
bed. The life of the individual as a member of society and particularly as
a part of the state may be regulated like a canal, but the life of nations
is a great rushing river which is utterly beyond human control, in the
hands of One who has always been stronger than men. The League of Nations,
which was supposed to possess supernatural authority, is regarded by some
as a child in need of care and protection, by others as an abortion. Thus,
the life of nations rolls on unchecked, without guidance, unconscious of
where it is going, like a rock crashing down the side of a hill, until it
is stopped by an obstacle stronger than itself. Political events move from
one impasse to the next, like a torrent caught in gullies, creeks and
marshes. All human control comes to an end when the individual is caught in
a mass movement. Then, the archetypes begin to function, as happens, also,
in the lives of individuals when they are confronted with situations that
cannot be dealt with in any of the familiar ways. But what a so-called
Fuhrer does with a mass movement can plainly be seen if we turn our eyes to
the north or south of our country.
The ruling archetype does not remain the same forever, as is evident from
the temporal limitations that have been set to the hoped-for reign of
peace, the “thousand-year Reich.” The Mediterranean father-archetype of the
just, order-loving, benevolent ruler had been shattered over the whole of
northern Europe, as the present fate of the Christian churches bears
witness. Fascism in Italy and the civil war in Spain show that in the south
as well the cataclysm has been far greater than one expected. Even the
Catholic Church can no longer afford trials of strength.
The nationalist God has attacked Christianity on a broad front. In Russia,
he is called technology and science, in Italy, Duce, and in Germany,
“German Faith,” “German Christianity,” or the State. “The German
Christians” are a contradiction in many terms and would do better to join
Hauer’s “German Faith Movement.” These are decent and well-meaning people
who honestly admit their Ergriffenheit and try to come to terms with this
new and undeniable fact. They go to an enormous amount of trouble to make
it look less alarming by dressing it up in a conciliatory historical garb
and giving us consoling glimpses of great figures such as Meister Eckhart,
who was, also, a German and, also, ergriffen. In this way the awkward
question of who the Ergreifer is is circumvented. He was always “God.” But
the more Hauer restricts the world-wide sphere of Indo-European culture to
the “Nordic” in general and to the Edda in particular, and the more
“German” this faith becomes as a manifestation of Ergriffenheit, the more
painfully evident it is that the “German” god is the god of the Germans.
One cannot read Hauer’s book without emotion, if one regards it as the
tragic and really heroic effort of a conscientious scholar who, without
knowing how it happened to him, was violently summoned by the inaudible
voice of the Ergreifer and is now trying with all his might, and with all
his knowledge and ability, to build a bridge between the dark forces of
life and the shining world of historical ideas. But what do all the
beauties of the past from totally different levels of culture mean to the
man of today, when confronted with a living and unfathomable tribal god such
as he has never experienced before? They are sucked like dry leaves into
the roaring whirlwind, and the rhythmic alliterations of the Edda became
inextricably mixed up with Christian mystical texts, German poetry and the
wisdom of the Upanishads. Hauer himself is ergriffen by the depths of
meaning in the primal words lying at the root of the Germanic languages, to
an extent that he certainly never knew before. Hauer the Indologist is not
to blame for this, nor yet the Edda; it is rather the fault of kairos – the
present moment in time – whose name on closer investigation turns out to be
Wotan. I would, therefore, advise the German Faith Movement to throw aside
their scruples. Intelligent people will not confuse them with the crude
Wotan-worshipers whose faith is a mere pretense. There are people in the
German Faith Movement who are intelligent enough not only to believe, but
to know, that the god of the Germans is Wotan and not the Christian God.
This is a tragic experience and no disgrace. It has always been terrible to
fall into the hands of a living god. Yahweh was no exception to this rule,
and the Philistines, Edomites, Amorites, and the rest, who were outside the
Yahweh experience, must certainly have found it exceedingly disagreeable.
The Semitic experience of Allah was for a long time an extremely painful
affair for the whole of Christendom. We who stand outside judge the Germans
far too much, as if they were responsible agents, but perhaps it would be
nearer the truth to regard them, also, as victims.
If we apply our admittedly peculiar point of view consistently, we are
driven to conclude that Wotan must, in time, reveal not only the restless,
violent, stormy side of his character, but, also, his ecstatic and mantic
qualities – a very different aspect of his nature. If this conclusion is
correct, National Socialism would not be the last word. Things must be
concealed in the background which we cannot imagine at present, but we may
expect them to appear in the course of the next few years or decades. Wotan’s
reawakening is stepping into the past; the stream was dammed up and has
broken into its old channel. But the Obstruction will not last forever; it
is rather a reculer pour mieux sauter, and the water will overleap
the obstacle. Then, at last, we shall know what Wotan is saying when he
“murmurs with Mimir’s head.”
Source: Temple of Wotan, Holy
Book of the Aryan Tribes by Ron McVan and Katja Lane (14 Word Press,
2000). First published as Wotan, Neue Schweizer Rundschau
(Zurich). n.s., III (March, 1936), 657-69 and translated into English anew
for the 14 Word Press edition.
|
